Felix Kammerer has one screen performance that matters so far, the schoolboy hollowed out by the trenches in All Quiet on the Western Front, built almost entirely from silence. What he does with lines, we are still waiting to find out.
Fi1m perspective
Paul Bäumer looks at his hands. Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) gives Kammerer almost nothing to say, so the performance lives in the face and in what he does when nobody is speaking to him, and the way he looks at his own hands does more work than most of the dialogue around him. Friend, the cinematographer, shoots him in close-up again and again, a round, open boy being hollowed out one shot at a time. Well before the halfway mark we found it hard to keep looking at him, and he had not said a word to explain why; Kammerer does it with the eyes and the set of the mouth, and no speech to help him.
It was his first film. He trained in Berlin, worked on stage there, and joined the Burgtheater in Vienna as a permanent member of the ensemble for the 2019/20 season, a job he has kept while the film work arrived. He has said of Paul, "I really liked that I couldn't see myself on the screen. I had nothing to do with that person." That is a stage actor's way of talking, and it fits what is on screen: the performance is built, piece by piece, and there is no trace of Kammerer in it to warm to or resent.
The screen work since has been smaller. A part in the miniseries All the Light We Cannot See (2023), a supporting role as Rudolph Lorenz in Ron Howard's Eden (2025), and William Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025), where he is Elizabeth's fiancé and the film has nothing for him to do. We wrote that he barely registers, and that is still our view; the fault is a script that cannot decide what most of the people around Victor are for. Still, the parts he is offered lean towards young men confronting war, and the risk is obvious. A face that reads as innocence turning to experience is a useful face, and directors will keep asking for it.
So the question about Kammerer is the one his debut left open. We know he can carry 147 minutes almost without dialogue, and we know he can vanish in a small part with dialogue. What we do not know is what happens when a director gives him a room, another actor and something to say. Berger got a great deal out of him by taking words away. Somebody should now try giving them back.
Biography
Felix Kammerer is an Austrian actor. Born in Vienna on 19 September 1995, he is the son of opera singers Angelika Kirchschlager and Hans Peter Kammerer. He trained at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and joined the ensemble of the Vienna Burgtheater in the 2019/20 season.
Kammerer made his feature film debut as Paul Bäumer in the 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. He has since appeared as Schmidt in the 2023 miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, as Rudolph Lorenz in Eden (2024) and as William Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025). He received the Nestroy Theatre Award for Best Young Male Performer in 2022 and the German Film Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in 2023 for All Quiet on the Western Front.
